


Code Monkey

by yellow_caballero



Category: Half-Life
Genre: AU where the resonance cascade doesn't happen, Deaf Character, Disabled Character, Gen, Sign Language, Understandable without being familiar with the source material, and everyone is very stressed out about this but our idiot heroes, just bros fighting weird dogs together, painfully 90s tech culture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:40:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25234066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yellow_caballero/pseuds/yellow_caballero
Summary: The experiment went off without a hitch.In which Barney slept through some very important employee orientations, Gordon is Death: Destroyer of Worlds, and they both have a slightly abnormal day at work.
Relationships: Barney Calhoun & Gordon Freeman
Comments: 15
Kudos: 109





	Code Monkey

**Author's Note:**

> Another instalment in the 'writing small, obscure fanfics in one day for small, obscure fandoms' chapter of my life. Silly, short little thing written in half a day. This exists because of Nymm_at_Night's new Half Life obsession, and my little sibling's middle school Half Life obsession, and because I know how boring science is. It's for y'all. 
> 
> Fair warning that this is a weird story. But hey, what isn't?

The experiment went off without a hitch. 

Experiments going well wasn’t a guarantee, and the Great ‘95 Nuclear Reactor Core Meltdown had been an extremely memorable event, but it was far from uncommon. They ran a tight ship at Black Mesa, and theoretical physics experiments with reactor cores and plasma energy were expensive enough that you couldn’t exactly afford to mess it up. 

His job was simple, since he was still a newbie who had only worked at the facility about two years, so he tried not to sweat the bigger stuff like collecting the data or working the ridiculously complex machines. He’d get the spreadsheets and analyze the data eventually. And they’d stick him with writing the paper and pretending his role had been greater than data collection, analysis, and if he was lucky, some literature review. 

Which was pretty much how Gordon liked it. Too much responsibility seems stressful, as well as that level of human interaction. If Gordon could only worry about himself and his own work, that would be an ideal situation.

Gordon contemplated how his role was better suited to a master’s student as he stood in the decontamination chamber, letting the valves and pneumatics steam, before stepping into the antechamber and disengaging his helmet. Sticking it under his arm, he walked up some stairs, navigated down a pristinely white hallway, and stepped over a rickety catwalk before entering the testing observation room, where his coworkers seemed to be frantically yelling at each other about something. 

Pushing a cart containing radioactive isotopes into a giant Mesa Coil (like Tesla Coil, but far more radioactive), marking the chemical reaction on a clipboard, blinking harshly to get the green spots out of your vision, and then exiting the test chamber with no fuss was hardly an unusual event in Dr. Gordon Freeman’s life. 

So it made no sense why Gordon’s coworkers looked so freaked out.

They all startled when he entered the room, but at his usual flat stare they quickly went back to yelling at each other. Kleiner was waving a clipboard at Wagner, who was yelling furiously with spittle coming out of his mouth. Braun was sitting on a rolling chair, frantically writing out equations and crossing them out, lips moving repetitively. Coomer was bent over a console, not paying attention to the arguing men, frantically flipping switches as if turning the machines off and back on again would solve whatever problem they were having. 

Gordon made an attempt to read their lips, but they were speaking too quickly and the flailing clipboard made it difficult. He caught something from Kleiner about the experiment, and something about it not working, and what they were going to do now. 

Bad data? Were the machines miscalibrated? Gordon hadn’t fucked up, had Braun forgotten to calibrate the machines? Was that why he looked like he was going to get fed to the radioactive waste pits? It was a silly worry. They only fed interns to those things. 

He tapped something quickly into the small screen set into the arm of his HEV suit, letting the robotic text to speech voice read it out. He hated the stupid thing, and he used it as infrequently as possible, but this seemed like something that might be his problem. “Is anything wrong.”

All three scientists, save Coomer, startled, before grinning widely with bared teeth at him. Braun gave him a fakey thumbs-up, smiling broadly with desperate eyes. Gordon read ‘fine, fine, fine’ on Kleiner’s lips.

Great. Not his problem, then. Gordon shrugged, gave them a sarcastic thumbs up back, and went to go take off the stuffy and annoying suit. 

  
  
  


What was on his to-do list for today...run the modelling program for the half-life isotopes, clean up the data from their uranium sample, and do some literature review for the manuscript. He was deeply uncertain about finding any papers proving that radiation could be used to power submachine guns, but Coomer had asked him to do it so he might as well give it a shot. 

Gordon sat at his computer, cradling his warm coffee close to his chest and chugging it. He felt his mind clear as the coffee coursed through his system, waking him up and helping him actually take stock of the day. He was pretty sure most of it hadn’t been hallucinated. He hadn’t hallucinated anything in...oh, days now. 

But that weird crab he saw scuttling along the floors this morning was probably hallucinated. That or it was just a really weird dog. Actually, considering the fact that a passerby coworker seemed to be frightened by it, it was probably a weird mutated dog. He wouldn’t be surprised if Kleiner was running experiments to see what would happen if you had puppies swallow uranium. He was that level of inefficient. There were multiple pre-existing studies on that, there was no point in even doing it. 

Gordon wasn’t important enough for his own office, so he shared an office space with his research team. Kleiner and Coomer’s office doors were tightly closed, and many of the desks seemed unusually vacated, but maybe there was a meeting or something. Shit, had Gordon forgotten a meeting?

His calendar said nothing about a meeting. Gordon answered a few emails, wishing that his entire correspondence with everybody on earth could be done through email. He really hoped that more companies adopted them. Maybe one day he could do his job from home, never communicating with a coworker except through email. That would be nice. 

Gordon pulled up the modelling program and leaned back in his chair, ready to wait the five minutes for the fancy program to load. He preferred MATLAB. Maybe he should have gone into computer science, since it was a growing field and all, but when he was choosing careers in high school he just couldn’t bring himself to deal with all those punch cards all day. Not that he ever saw those at Black Mesa, since all of its stuff was so top of the line, but if it was top of the line then why did everyone always forgot to hire an interpreter for meetings -

Something moved in the corner of his vision, and Gordon jerked his head up. One of his coworkers, a chubby guy with bad facial hair whose name Gordon had never bothered to memorize, was staring at him. Blatantly, with wide eyes, almost shaking in fear. Gordon tilted his head in a silent question and the guy quickly went back to his computer, typing away furiously at his keyboard. 

Okay. Sure. 

But that weird encounter happened again, and again, and again. People that Gordon knew worked downstairs mysteriously found something important to do on his floor, and when they walked past his cubicle their eyes fixated on him. Some more courageous scientists in white coats stood several feet away from him, with their backs carefully turned, seemingly talking to each other with tense body language. His desk-mates, his coworkers who he saw every day and played paper football with when work got too boring, kept their eyes rigorously fixed on their screens and refused to make eye contact with him for longer than a few seconds. 

It was very distracting, and made it hard for Gordon to work.

Normally after a big experiment like this morning, the PIs - Kleiner, Coomer, Braun, and Wagner - called a meeting with the research associates and they talked about next steps. But Gordon didn’t see any of the four men again, and when he sent them an interrogatory email over if he had missed a meeting invitation none of them responded but Coomer, who just sent back a strangely anxious smiley face. 

If nobody wanted to assign him anything to take care of, then he wasn’t complaining. Gordon shrugged, finished encoding the model and pressed compile. Theoretical physics at the giant government facility complex in New Mexico that made him sign five hundred NDAs: hurry up and wait for your programs to load. Nobody ever told him his life would be so boring. 

Gordon was browsing through the Black Mesa Newsletter (which, today, just read BE PREPARED in a large black font and a lot of wingdings underneath) when he felt a tap at his shoulder. Spinning around in his chair, Gordon saw the painfully cheerful and criminally high energy Barney leaning against his cubicle wall, almost knocking over Gordon’s Far Side desk calendar. 

“Guess who is super! Fucking! Hung-over!” Barney signed empathetically, throwing his whole body into the gestures. 

“You already told me that this morning,” Gordon signed back, leaning back in his chair and clicking out of the email client to check on his model compiling. “Don’t you have a job to do?”

Not that his job ever stopped Barney. Barney, as one of the few people in the building who knew sign (“My grandma’s Deaf, you should meet her sometime! Lady can really sling back the booze!”) and basically Gordon’s only friend on campus, was a security guard who patrolled Gordon’s floor and found plenty of excuses to drop by his desk and bother him. Gordon didn’t really mind. He typically wasn’t working on anything important, and if Barney wanted a break from the monotony of tackling crying men in lab coats who were screaming about the hubris of man and Icarus’ demise then that was his prerogative. 

“Not today!” Barney signed cheerfully. “My entire unit’s running emergency shelter in place drills, and I totally slept through that orientation, so they told me to buzz off. Last time I saw any of them they were slinging submachine guns over their backs and sitting in a prayer circle. Weird dudes.”

“You slept through every orientation.” Huh. Gordon narrowed his eyes, fixing his glasses. “There’s a prayer circle around the water cooler on this floor too.”

“Black Mesa chapel’s packed. That place is never full.”

Barney and Gordon stared at each other for a moment. 

“Would the company have sent a newsletter if the Reds finally nuked us?” Barney asked finally. 

Gordon checked his email inbox. Nothing, except another email from the CEO that basically just read ‘Only God can save us now. Do not resist.’ Gordon showed the email to Barney, who rubbed his chin thoughtfully. Another email arrived, which read very clearly, ‘DISREGARD THE PREVIOUS MESSAGE UNTIL FURTHER ACTION IS TAKEN’. 

“That is weird,” Barney signed finally, pulling a face. “Did anything go wrong with your experiment this morning?”

Gordon shook his head. It had gone perfectly. 

Except...the PIs seemed to be acting as if it had gone wrong somehow. But what had gone wrong? Nobody was telling him anything. Which normally meant that it was none of his business, and therefore Gordon should pretend that it didn’t exist lest it become his business. Gordon minded his own business. He was very good at it. That was why Black Mesa had hired him. 

He told Barney about his weird morning, who looked as if he was thinking very hard. The expression did not suit Barney’s face well, and it seemed to stress him out a bit. He finally signalled for Gordon to wait a minute, and he jogged off to tap David in Geology on the shoulder behind Gordon. David had already been standing up, tearfully placing pictures of his family in a cardboard box. 

They exchanged words for a little while, Barney’s body language gregarious and cheerful and David’s much more reserved. Every few seconds David’s eyes flitted to Gordon, before flickering away again. 

Gordon tilted his head. Weird.

When he looked around, actually, he saw more of his coworkers doing the same. Mohammad’s shoulders were shaking, his face buried in his hands. He may have been crying. Andres was going through a rosary. Jenny was cleaning a gun, lips moving. 

Barney had noticed too, and after exchanging a friendly back-pat with David he jogged lightly to Jenny’s desk, pointing at her gun. They talked again, but something moved from the corner of Gordon’s vision. A pop-up signified that his model was done, and Gordon swivelled back around in his chair, adding some parameters to the model.

Finally, Barney popped up at the side of his cubicle again, leaning on the short wall. He seemed slightly perturbed, which was an unusual look on him. “So weird news.”

“Not bad news?” 

“No, just weird.” Barney pulled a quizzical face, shaking his hands slightly and indicating uncertainty. “They were really cagey about it, and wouldn’t tell me much. But…” Barney snapped his fingers a little, searching for the right way to phrase it. “...have you felt any homicidal impulses lately?” He apparently didn’t know the word for ‘homicidal’, instead making the sign for murder and repeating the kniving motion several times for emphasis. 

“No more than usual,” Gordon signed, with a flat face.

“Right, that’s what I thought. Everyone seems to think as if...you’re supposed to do something, but you aren’t doing it.” 

“Oh my god,” Gordon signed, horrified, “I did forget a meeting.”

“See, I don’t think it’s a meeting.” Barney tapped his chin several times in thought. “But I don’t know what it could be...oh, well.” Barney shrugged. “I have to go back to work. I’ll try to see if I can get to the bottom of why everyone’s acting weird and asking me why you haven’t begun the procedure yet. See you at lunch, Gordon!”

“See you at lunch,” Gordon signed back, and as Barney jogged away he went back to work. 

Barney was nice, but he was kind of ‘off’ sometimes. To be fair, Barney said the same thing about him, so maybe they were well-suited for each other. 

Eventually, his coffee mug became nothing but dregs, and Gordon stood up from his chair. He stretched, working out his back muscles, and ignored how everyone froze in their chairs. David, caught in the middle of drinking his own coffee, was shaking so much his coffee spilled from its mug.

Hope he cleaned that up. Gordon walked a little down the hall, passing by Kleiner’s door. It was ajar, just slightly, and Gordon stopped. The light wasn’t on, so he likely wasn’t in, but maybe he was. He patted his pockets to make sure that he had his pen and pencil, and quickly poked his head in.

The office was empty. It was bare, as usual, just some framed degrees and a periodic table of elements on the wall. Kleiner’s desk was messy with paperwork, print-outs, and forms. Gordon walked over the desk and, keeping a careful corner of his eye on the door, rifled through the papers a little. It probably wasn’t a polite thing to do, but...eh.

Most of them were about the experiment that they had conducted that morning. That, at least, was obvious - the material requisition, the room reservation, the science and math and procedures that they all followed. Every step of the experiment was documented, clean and orderly, just like Kleiner.

Except...nothing _after_ the experiment was documented. With another glance at the door, Gordon began taking a closer look at the paperwork. No analyses to do on the data they collected. No hypotheses or research questions to interrogate. No correspondence with anybody about other researchers using the data set. It was almost as if they had just done the experiment to do it. And whatever happened afterwards...maybe nothing was _planned_ to happen afterwards.

Hm. Maybe Gordon should start paying more attention to stuff that wasn’t strictly his job. He was never going to get promoted if he never showed initiative. 

Still, rooting through his boss’ office likely wasn’t what those employee handbooks meant by initiative. Carefully rearranging the papers exactly as he found them, Gordon slipped out of the office. He left the door ajar - unless he should make it obvious he was in here and show that he displayed initiative? Workplace politics were hard. 

Well, it had been three hours since his last Monster, and he was getting a caffeine withdrawal headache. Gordon walked down the hallway into the breakroom, counting out coins in his palm. He noticed, out of the corner of his vision, that the break room was surprisingly full of people in a desperate huddle for eleven am - normally that kind of thing didn’t start until three - but when he looked up to check out the scene, his colleagues had already dispersed and were anxiously reading their books or newspapers and were crouched over their food, protecting it from scavenging IT guys. 

The corkboard on the wall was full of fliers, as usual, and Gordon stopped to read them in an effort to waste as much time as possible. Advertisements for the on-campus gun range, as usual. Hadn’t Barney wanted to take him? That’s right, he kept on nagging him about it, but Gordon found guns pretty uninteresting and kept on passing. Barney kept on saying it was about the challenge of hitting the target from a distance, but what was hard about that? You just pointed and shot. 

Another flier advertised special ‘End of Days’ services in the chapel, with a date and time for...nine am this morning. That explained why the chapel was so full, at least. Workplace continuing education seminar about explosive weaponries, warnings about maintaining NDAs, advertisement for a speech by the CEO about ‘adapting to adverse situations’, babysitting services...the usual. 

Gordon moved onto the vending machine, counting out his change and sliding it coin by coin into the machine. His heart beat faster with excitement. That’s right, come to Papa. Come into his hands, you sweet over-caffeinated energy drinks that tasted like glow stick fluid. Come to Gordon -

Something slammed into the vending machine next to Gordon. 

Fragments of glass showered his coat, and an explosion of light and color reverberating in front of Gordon’s eyes. He stumbled back, avoiding the sparking electricity coming from the cracked face of the vending machine and felt his shoes grit into something hard and scratchy. It wasn’t until Gordon saw what had slammed into the vending machine that he actively tried to keep his distance.

It was one of those...mutated dogs from earlier. It was small, pale and fleshy, and instead of eyes and a muzzle and a jaw it just had one large, slobbering mouth rimmed in teeth. Its legs were spindly, hard keratin surrounding what seemed to be its feet, and it was thrusting itself full-body at the nearest attractive object. A second ago that object had been the now sadly destroyed vending machine, Coke cans rolling out of it, and now that object seemed to be Gordon.

The gross dog threw itself at Gordon, and Gordon quickly dodged out of the way. He stepped backwards, noticing that his Monster had thumped onto the bottom of the machine, and grabbed it and stashed it in his coat. The dog circled him, mouth undulating and teeth slobbering, and Gordon cautiously stepped behind the large break room table. He bumped against a wooden chair. 

Quickly, Gordon sized up the situation. The dog was in front of the door, spit drooling from its mouth, so he couldn’t just run. It seemed violent, probably rabid. When was the last time Gordon had gotten his tetanus shot? When he was hired? Gordon didn’t want to get rabies, Barney would make fun of him for years. Best to keep his distance and kill it, then. 

Without taking his eyes from the monster, Gordon grabbed the chair next to him and slammed his foot down on a weak joint. The chair leg splintered from the chair, and Gordon carefully held the large wooden leg up as if it was a baseball bat. One, two, three…

It was on Gordon’s third carefully measured breath that the dog jumped, in a particularly leaping and springy motion that dogs weren’t famous for. With perfect aim, timing, and confidence, Gordon swung his makeshift baseball bat and slammed it into the balloon-like body of the dog. 

It landed on the floor, little chest heaving and four legs squirming like a cockroach. For good measure, Gordon stood over it on the floor and quickly stomped it to death. The flesh was nothing like a dog’s either, rather thin and rubbery, and quickly his loafers split skin and the dog deflated like a balloon, intestines oozing out of the thin slit and all over his shoes. 

Gross. Gordon wrinkled his nose, carefully wiping his shoes on the tile. He grabbed some paper towels and wiped the gunk from them as best as he could, noticing that the intestines seemed to be thin and coiling, fluorescent and gently pulsating thin strands. They weren’t any recognizable offal from a normal animal. Gordon tossed the towels in the garbage before grabbing the corpse by a leg like a dead rat and dumping it inside the break room’s biochemical hazard waste bin.

Taking advantage of an opportunity, Gordon slid more Monsters from the broken vending machine in his pockets, loading himself up, and grabbed a honey bun for good measure. 

When he opened the door, he saw every single inhabitant of the break room huddled outside the door, apparently peering through the small window and listening in at the cracks. It was only then that Gordon realized that, although the break room had been almost full when he walked in, when the weird dog attacked it had been empty. 

Oh. The dog must have escaped from some research experiment, snuck inside, and everybody else must have heard it and escaped before it could attack. Gordon, utterly intent on the delivery of the energy drink into his eager hands, hadn’t noticed.

Damn. That was kind of cold. Normally when there was a fire alarm or a siren or something somebody usually went out of their way to let him know. One time Gordon had been in the bathroom during a containment breach and Barney had actually stayed behind in the building to make sure that Gordon knew what was happening and that he got out alright. 

Every colleague watched him with wide eyes, frozen where they stood. One of them was carrying what looked like a large dog cage, which he quickly hid behind his back. Gordon carefully got out his handheld whiteboard, wrote in large clear letters across its length ‘DICK MOVE’, showed it to everyone and pointed at it empathetically, and then cracked open his Monster and walked back to his cubicle.

When he got back to his cubicle, he saw every desk around him was deserted. David, Mohammad, Jenny - everyone was gone. Mugs sat on desks, half-full, and chairs swiveled slightly in the cold office air. 

They must have gone to an early lunch. Gordon shrugged and sat back down at his cubicle, sipping from the Monster again. Sweet caffeine. Time to get started on that data cleaning. 

After an hour of data cleaning, Gordon was kind of wishing for another mutant dog to kill. Jesus, his job was boring. He would get another one, but Black Mesa just paid too well to ever quit. That was how they got you, Gordon supposed. Now he was just another cog in the corporate machine. 

Ah, well. There were worse things to be than well-paid in a cushy office job with seemingly infinite funding and endless supply of fascinating morally ambiguous experiments. Gordon had asked Coomer his first day here about if he had to type up an IRB proposal for the new experiment on human tolerance to uranium poisoning and Coomer had asked, with a straight face, what an IRB was. It was the ideal workplace. Or it would be, if it wasn’t for the occasionally escaping mutant dogs. 

At noon, Barney dropped by again for lunch. He seemed slightly more worried than he had this morning, but when Gordon passed him the pilfered honey bun he seemed to brighten up. 

“So something’s definitely going on,” Barney signed, mouth full of honey bun and chewing contentedly as Gordon pulled on his jacket and took his lunch out of his mini-fridge. “My entire unit’s been reassigned to weird places, like the spooky basements and the top-secret areas I’m normally not even allowed to breathe in. I’ve also been seeing a crazy amount of military guys running around. Weird, right?”

“Definitely weird,” Gordon agreed as they walked down the hallway. They both watched a woman from HR run down the hallway in high heels holding a sniper rifle. “All of my research team is gone.”

“Maybe they’re at an orientation meeting?” Barney scratched his chin as they stopped in front of the elevator, pressing the button and making it flash. “Dick move of them not to invite you after what happened the last time, though.”

“I swear to god I’m going to report this place to the DOJ,” Gordon griped. “Black Mesa shouldn’t get so much federal funding if it can’t even abide by federal laws in hiring an interpreter. I still don’t know anything they said during my employee orientation!”

A passerby said something to Barney, pointing at the elevator, and Barney nodded before steering him to the stairwell. “Elevator’s closed down, apparently. And I’m sure you didn’t miss much. I slept through the thing and I’m fine! I think.”

They didn’t talk as much in the stairwell, Gordon easily jumping stairs and waiting for a slightly wheezing Barney at the top of each flight. They finally made it to the bottom floor, exiting the stairwell and waiting for the large troupe of soldiers carrying giant guns and mysterious machines to storm past. 

“Maybe there's training going on?” Barney asked. “Our gun range is freakishly big.”

“I’m guessing theirs is bigger.”

The cafeteria was as abandoned as the other leisure areas. The bad tempered lunch ladies who didn’t like Gordon were gone, and the cash registers were left unmanned. Gordon and Barney glanced at each other, shrugged, and sat down at a table to eat their lunches. 

Gordon’s was a ham and mustard sandwich with another Monster. Barney’s was cold pizza that he refused to microwave. Gordon wondered if they were functional adults. Probably not. 

“So,” Barney said, shoving a lot of pizza in his mouth and then putting it down so he could chew and sign, “catch the game last night?”

“Sure. Fuck yeah, Patriots.” Gordon had never actually seen a sports game in his life - his usual routine upon returning to his dorm was feeding his cat, making himself dinner, and then lying in bed for six hours staring at the ceiling - but he read up on last night’s game every morning so he could make conversation with Barney about it. He hadn’t caught on yet. “Think they’ll make it to the Superbowl this year?”

They chatted absently for a while, occasionally pausing so they could focus on eating and making scattered conversation. The cafeteria being empty at noon was definitely off-putting, but it seemed to disturb Barney more than Gordon. At his prodding, Gordon eventually told him about the encounter with the weird dog. It seemed to startle Barney, who signed his words with a frantic worry that seemed appropriate to the situation.

“You were attacked by an escaped experiment and you just beat it to death?!”

“I mean, what else was I supposed to do with it?” 

Barney hesitated a second, somewhat uncharacteristically, distress written across his expression. Slowly, he signed out, “Do you think your coworkers may have put it in there?”

“It’s possible.” Gordon chewed his sandwich. “I did see one holding a dog carrier. Can’t imagine a motive, though.”

“Me neither.” Barney stared at his pizza crust, looking deeply uncomfortable and somewhat concerned. “Today’s really gone off the deep end, man.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Let’s get some drinks after my -”

Barney stopped short, almost jumping in his seat, hands lingering in the air. His jaw dropped, and he looked at something fixedly over Gordon’s shoulder. Gordon chewed his sandwich. 

“We have to get out of here,” Barney signed, as quickly and slurred as he was physically capable, and he jumped out of his seat. Gordon tried to ask him what the big deal was, but he was no longer paying attention, instead grabbing Gordon’s sleeve and tugging him upwards with a frantic look on his face. With his other hand, he drew out a large rifle from its holder on the back of his vest. 

Gordon stood upwards, craning his head to see what Barney was looking at, and only then saw the commotion in the lunch line. 

The first thing he noticed was a woman in line, holding a tray with an apple and a chicken salad on it. One of the dogs was on her face, clasping it tightly and pulsating. The woman was waving her arms around, stumbling desperately. Behind her, more of the dogs were attacking the food stands. One was knocking over a rack of Little Debbie snacks, teeth gyrating in hunger, and others were chewing plastic containers of bad sushi. 

Hm. Gordon quickly drained his Monster, sensing that he wouldn’t have the opportunity to finish it later. Barney was frozen in fear, eyes wide as dinner plates and his hands shaking on his giant gun. Gordon tapped him on the shoulder, and when Barney failed to respond he eventually had to shake him. Gordon pointed at the back-up gun on his waist, his usual standard issue Glock. 

With his hands full with the giant fuck-off gun Barney couldn’t argue, but he shook his head. Gordon asked for it more empathetically as the woman slowly got eaten by the weird dog, and eventually Barney gave up and passed it to him, his eyebrow clearly skeptical that Gordon even knew how to shoot it.

There were two exits from the cafeteria: one into the food court area, which seemed to be swarming with weird dogs, and another close to it that led into a hallway that they had entered from. 

Barney tapped Gordon’s shoulder and pointed at the hallway, trying to gently push Gordon in that direction. Gordon shook his head, tucking the gun under his armpit and quickly signing out, “The dogs eating are distracted, and might not notice us. The ones in the hallway are hungrier. Let’s try that way and see if they ignore us.”

With his hands full Barney couldn’t sign, but he enunciated very clearly verbally, ‘I don’t think they’re dogs’. 

Yeah, neither did Gordon, but there really wasn’t anything better to call them. He squinted at the one attached to the woman’s head like some sort of facehugger. Facehuggers, maybe? He didn’t know the sign for that. Probably maybe if you did the ‘hug’ motion over your face, that would work, but -

Experimentally, Gordon lifted the Glock and shot one of the periphery ones, chewing on a bottle of water. It seemed to expire, curling up and lying on its back as offal spilled out, and Gordon watched the others carefully to see if they reacted to aggression. They didn’t seem to care that their compatriot was dead, so Gordon decided to take the methodical route. 

He ducked behind a table, Barney quickly following him, and pushed it against the ground to serve as a shield. He crouched behind it and, with quick and methodical precision, shot the facehuggers skittering around the food court. They died quickly, and soon enough Barney caught onto what he was doing. Within minutes the heavy reverberations and bass thumps of the rifle vibrated in Gordon’s sternum. 

As soon as the last food court facehugger expired, Gordon vaulted over the makeshift barricade and ran for the exit. Barney was hot on his heels, occasionally turning to shoot at stragglers that he must have heard leaping for them. When Gordon chanced a glance backwards, he saw Barney frantically speaking into his walkie-talkie, but he didn’t seem happy by what he heard back. If he heard anything back. 

The hallways were deserted, save for running employees carrying fuck-off huge weaponry. Women in pantsuits brandished sniper rifles, and old men in lab coats carried grenades. Occasionally, facehuggers scampered across the floor and Gordon picked them off. He typically carried a ‘leave no hostiles alive’ policy that worked well in job interviews and meetings, and he figured that this was basically the same thing. 

Eventually they turned the corner to find a keycard only accessible lab. Barney quickly pressed his ID against it, the pad flashing green - Gordon was very glad Barney was here, actually - and the door sliding open. They both ducked inside, pulling the heavy duty door shut behind them. 

Both men turned to stare at each other. Barney’s eyes were wide and wild, his hands shaking from their grip on the shotgun. He slung it over his shoulder to free his hands, signing with uncharacteristic shakiness. 

“That,” Barney signed out empathetically, with sharp and intense gestures, “was not a dog.”

“What do I look like,” Gordon said, flicking the safety on the Glock, “a biologist?”

“I don’t know! You sure looked like fucking Rambo back there, dude!”

“Thanks, that’s nice of you.” His coat began vibrating annoyingly, so Gordon dug his pager out of his lab coat pocket, shaking it and frowning little. 

In scrolling letters, the pager read: CODE RED EMERGENCY. PLAN B INITIATED. REPORT TO BATTLE STATIONS. IF GOD WILL NOT SAVE MAN, MAN WILL SAVE OURSELVES. DO NOT TOLERATE THE MILITARY. 

Hm. Gordon wondered if he was going to get to that literature review today.

Barney was reading what Gordon was guessing was the same thing off his pager, face white. When he looked up at Gordon he forced his face into something approximating confidence and cheerfulness, his smile more of a rictus grin. 

“It’s going to be alright, Gordon,” Barney signed, after putting his pager back in his pocket. “I’m a trained guard. I’ll get us out of here no problem. Don’t worry about a thing.”

Gordon, who was well aware that Barney’s training had consisted of a week’s training on how to use a gun and two weeks worth of fire safety rules that he slept through, did not feel very reassured by this. 

The lab that they had snuck into looked like a a standard chemistry lab, the kind that Gordon had seen a thousand times. All industrial chemistry labs looked the same: counters and overhead storage pressed up against each other, crumpled aisles with occasional fume hoods at each end, and centrifuges perched at the feet of each table. Micropipettes lay on pads and open tubes of solution sat on the counter, which was terrible laboratory practice. 

When Gordon walked closer to one of the interrupted experiments, he saw that the fume hood light was still on, and he guessed the fan was going. In it was a test tube of viscous, bright green liquid, roiling in its container and bubbling slightly. None of this should have ever been left unattended. 

Suddenly, the green liquid sloshed so alarmingly that the tube spilled free of its stand - which should have been almost impossible - and spilled on the surface of the fume hood. The green liquid bubbled, and Gordon watched it eat through the metal. A bad smell began to waft out of the hood, barely contained by the fan. Acid. 

He stepped back, walking down the aisles to a table pressed up against a wall with a large computer on it. Maybe he could email Coomer or Kleiner, ask for help -

A tap on his shoulder, and Gordon looked up to find Barney. He seemed grim. “I checked the desk area, just off from this lab,” Barney signed. “I found the experimenters.” He paused, hands shaking so bad that he had trouble forming the words. Barney licked his lips. “They’re...very dead. The monsters, I think.”

“Are the monsters still here?” Gordon asked, already drawing out his pistol. 

But Barney just shook his head. “No, they’re long gone. I think -”

That’s when another facehugger leaped from above one of the storage units, spittle flying out of its giant, fleshy pincers, and Gordon reflexively punched it. 

It sailed off, almost cartoonishly, and Gordon quickly followed up the punch with a double tap to the stomach. Barney didn’t even have time to react, frozen in horror. 

The only thing that stirred him was Gordon asking for more ammo, which he handed over without comment. 

“These things really aren’t that difficult to kill,” Gordon noted, gently kicking Barney to get his attention. “I’m guessing this is another containment breach with escaped experiments. But if it is, why didn’t they sound off an alert? And how did they get through the entire facility so quickly?”

Barney didn’t say anything, supposedly thinking hard, and Gordon let him. He combed the rest of the laboratory for more of the facehuggers, only finding a straggler hiding underneath a refrigerator. When he opened up the fridge, he found more of the bright green substance. It was labelled ‘HC AC01 BLOOD’. 

Hm. Gordon took the opportunity to clean off his glasses in the sink. 

When he reconvened with Barney, he finally seemed ready to talk. 

“I think,” Barney signed out carefully, “these things were released on purpose.”

“I had reached that conclusion too,” Gordon signed out diplomatically. “Can we call them this?” He showed Barney his invented sign for them, crossing his hands over his face. 

“I was going to call them headcrabs,” Barney said, making a pincer motion at his temples. 

“Oh, that’s better.” 

“Thanks.” Barney took a second to respond again. His hands had finally stopped shaking, but he still didn’t seem very happy. “You said that you’ve never fired a gun before.”

“I haven’t.” Gordon double checked the magazine of his Glock, making sure the firing pin was unobstructed. 

Barney gave him the most skeptical face that he physically could. Gordon shrugged. Guns were easy, he didn’t know how to explain it. 

“If you’re an undercover Marine you have to tell me, dude. That’s the rule.”

“That’s cops, and that’s a myth.” Gordon tapped his fingers together in thought before speaking again. “Plan B. Could it be the experiment was Plan A?”

“What are you talking about?”

But Gordon was deep in thought too, the day slowly being pieced together. The anxiety tentative in the air all day, the fear of his coworkers. He really didn’t know what this had to do with him, but he _had_ been the one who was closest to the experiment, right? Maybe Gordon had been expected to do something, and he hadn’t done it. 

He hadn’t done it, or he hadn’t done it right, and so Black Mesa had unleashed plan B. Which was...headcrabs. Not a very effective plan B. 

Every single solitary time one of his coworkers had said something to him and just expected him to know what they were saying flashed through his mind. Every time they assumed being able to read lips meant that you could understand everything perfectly. Every time they had a staff meeting without an interpreter. 

Yes, it was exceptionally possible that Gordon was supposed to do something and nobody had bothered to tell him. This was why he was constantly worried about missing meetings! 

Still, that didn’t really explain why the military was there. Or what the headcrabs were. Or why his coworkers put him in a miniature gladiator break room arena with them. Or really anything. Gordon really tried to mind his own business and not worry about other people’s lives, but when other people’s lives tried to eat his face then he took slight umbrage. 

“We have to find Coomer and the other PIs,” Gordon said finally, having reached a decision. Barney looked strongly as if he had wished that Gordon had said ‘we have to get out of here as fast as possible’. “If the experiment had anything to do with this, they know about it. I need to know what this business has to do with me.”

“Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with you,” Barney said desperately. “You’re just in the wrong place, wrong time. Right? Like, what could you possibly have to do with this?”

Gordon really didn’t know. Which, objectively, was what bothered him. 

When they finally left the wet lab, Gordon took point and Barney took up the rear. The hallways were deserted of everything but headcrabs and the occasional running employee. Sometimes, Barney heard the sound of jackboots thumping down the halls and pulled Gordon into the closest room. 

They tried to get out of the building through the lobby, but the military presence there was so overwhelming they both agreed to skip it. Gordon knew a back exit, and it was reachable through the fourth floor of the building where they both guessed the PIs would be. Coomer, Kleiner, Wagner, and Braun rarely left their floors, like caged animals pacing the confines of their world. 

As they progressed further, closer to where the live specimens were kept, they began seeing different kinds of monsters. Ones that shambled on two legs, moving with startling speed. Gordon had started lifting rifles off the corpses of military men, headcrabs clamped to their temples, and they made quick work out of the miniature monsters, but Barney didn’t seem any happier. 

The staircase had a _lot_ of monsters, the gloom lit only by the flash of the muzzle, and eventually Gordon found a crowbar and just started beating monsters off the railing and sending them spinning down four stories below. He noticed that their skin seemed to be thin and soft, and the bigger ones had issues jumping. Either they were genetic experiments, monsters, or aliens from a world with low gravity. Anything was possible. Gordon wondered if he would have time to put his work on an external hard drive before they left the facility - he’d hate for them to lose the data. That shit was expensive. 

But probably not. Barney seemed like he wanted them out of there as soon as possible.

Finally, they got back to the theoretical physics wing. Gordon checked Kleiner’s office again, only to find it locked. After he shot off the hinges, he opened it to find it closed and undisturbed. When he tried Braun’s office, he stepped inside and was immediately hit with the thick stench of blood. 

Gordon stared at the corpse sitting in the plush office chair, its throat ripped out. Silent, still, and cold. It smelled awful and pungent. Gordon stepped forward, scanning the papers on Braun’s desk. The read-outs from the experiments were torn roughly in two, as if in frustration. But what caught Gordon’s eye was the readout of what looked like an MRI. 

He squinted at it. It didn’t really make any sense to him. A dark spot in the brain was circled in red marker, with several exclamation points. It was in the front of the brain, and another circled spot was closer to the middle. Again, it didn’t make any sense. 

He was getting ready to move on when he noticed the name at the top of the print-out. It was his own: FREEMAN, GORDON J. His birth date - 7/1/70. The date of the MRI, and Gordon recognized it as during his employee wellness screening. He hadn’t understood why they had taken an MRI at the time, or asked him to watch snuff films as they did, but…

What was Dr. Braun doing with it? 

Well, it wasn’t useful to him. Gordon left it, raiding Dr. Braun’s minifridge and stealing one of his Monsters, chugging it quickly before leaving the office and shaking his head at Barney. 

Finally, finally, as they cautiously stepped into the locker room, they had some luck. 

Dr. Coomer was sitting on one of the benches in the locker room, clutching a picture frame in his hands and staring at it blankly. Gordon recognized it as the stock photograph he kept in his locker of a small child, meant to assuage anxious coworkers who kept on asking him if he had a family or loved ones. He had two similar ones on his desk, the only decorations other than his Far Side calendar and his souvenir magnet from Roswell. They didn’t feature the same children but that was probably fine, nobody was that interested. 

Barney seemed to yell something, attracting Dr. Coomer’s attention. Gordon noted, somewhat clinically, that Coomer seemed bad. Worse than Barney, actually - thick bags were underneath his eyes, his Einstein hair all puffed out and uncombed. 

Coomer smiled, the motion not reaching his eyes. He said something to Barney, and signed his usually enthusiastic, “Hello, Gordon!” to Gordon. 

Coomer was pretty nice. Gordon basically liked Coomer. He was one of the few people who had made an effort to learn some basic signs so he could exchange pleasantries with Gordon each morning. Unfortunately, he had forgotten most of them save “Hello”, “Goodbye”, and Gordon’s name, so each morning Gordon was treated to an exuberant “Hello, Gordon!” and very little else. Still, it was sweet. 

But he knew something. The same something that everybody but Gordon seemed to know. And Barney, for whatever reason. 

After exchanging a few quick words, Barney began speaking to Coomer and signing along with his words for Gordon’s benefit. When Coomer spoke, Barney quickly translated for Gordon. 

“Doctor, what the hell are those monsters?” Barney signed and, Gordon presumed, asked verbally. “They’ve been infesting the place like roaches and killing people. Just what’s going on in this place?”

But Coomer just sighed, and began speaking as Barney translated. “Just another testament to man’s hubris, my boy.” Barney had to fingerspell both ‘testament’ and ‘hubris’, very pissed off at the unnecessarily grandiose vocabulary. “As Icarus did, we flew too close to the sun, and our wax wings were melted off.”

“Look,” Gordon said, “just tell us if Black Mesa has been genetically splicing monsters. I promise we won't be mad.”

“Don’t be silly, Gordon, we would never do that,” Dr. Coomer informed them. “We’ve been experimenting on aliens using localized teleportation technology!”

Once again Barney was forced to get creative with his translation, but it didn’t help by how increasingly furious he looked. “Why the fuck are we doing that!”

“Why, to take over the world,” Dr. Coomer said, as if this was a surprise. “Why else?”

They stood there for a second, nobody talking. Barney looked as if he wanted to pistol whip Dr. Coomer right then and there, and Dr. Coomer just looked sad. He was still holding the fake photograph of Gordon’s baby, as if it meant something to him, to anyone. 

Finally, after Barney apparently came to terms with this new piece of information, he spoke again. “So you’re telling me,” Barney signed empathetically, mouth moving along with the words, “Black Mesa has secretly been trying to end the _entire world_ this _entire time_ and Gordon and I were the only ones who _didn’t know_?”

“It was covered in employee orientation,” Coomer said, Barney putting an exaggeratedly reproachful tint on the words. “Didn’t you pay attention? It was mandatory, you two!”

“This place isn’t ADA compliant, they didn’t give Gordon an ASL interpreter, and, in my defense, it was _really_ boring!”

“What does this have to do with me?” Gordon cut in. “Everybody’s been acting as if I was the one who meant to do this, and didn’t. Or as if I’m...strange.” He paused for a second, thinking. “They’ve acted as if I was strange.”

“You’re a freak, man,” Barney told him supportively. 

But Dr. Coomer just sighed, as if he had expected this question from Gordon for a long time. Like a teacher who had been waiting for their student to finally ask why the sky was blue, or why objects fell downwards. “Do you remember falling off your bicycle when you were ten, Gordon?”

Yes, obviously. He still had the little scar behind his ear. Barney looked horrified. “Is that how you lost your hearing?”

“No, my hearing’s congenital. All I got was a concussion.” Gordon narrowed his eyes at Coomer. “Right?”

Coomer sighed again. “Gordon, the boys in the psych lab have been studying you for years now. I know you aren’t much of a neuroscientist, but please understand that pathways in the brain are developed through experience and training.” He paused to let Barney struggle through the fingerspelling of several of the terms. “Skills like tactical reconnaissance, firearm training, and basic combat awareness. However, every so often, a complete abnormality is born. Either a new kind of neanderthal, or a replacement to homo sapiens. Or, maybe, proof that everything we think we understand about humanity is wrong.”

Hm. His mandatory Monday morning psych appointments where he was forced to engage in virtual tests to determine reflexes and working memory were suddenly recontextualized. 

“Gordon, you were born a perfect killing machine. Your life and your memories are formed over this subliminal knowledge. But, at a certain point in your life, your childhood brain injury severed a connection.” Coomer looked contemplative. “We still aren’t sure which one. Your capacity for fear? Empathy? Hesitation? Whatever it is, there is something profoundly missing in you, Gordon Freeman. Something intrinsically different. You’re the only man alive like you, and the only one who can defeat all of the aliens and save humanity. That’s why you work for Black Mesa. So you don’t do that.” He looked contemplative again. “Or maybe so you do. I understand so very little of what I do.”

It was at that point that Barney started yelling at Coomer, giving up on translating and apparently just losing his top. Gordon was still stuck on this revelation about his personality and his soul. 

Did it make sense? Yes. Did science work like that? He wasn’t a neuropsychologist, so he wasn’t quite sure. It didn’t seem strictly _wrong._ Barney had seemed very surprised by his intrinsic capability to wield any weapon, including the RPG that they had found on the third floor, but Gordon had just assumed that weapons weren’t very difficult. Seriously, you just pointed and shot. 

Finally, Barney had calmed down enough to sign again. “We all have to get out of here,” Barney said. “If this is the first step of Black Mesa’s take over the world plan, I want _none_ of it. You come with us, we’ll all get out, and then the military and this evil place can shoot each other to death for all I care.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” Dr. Coomer said, seemingly troubled. “Gordon was supposed to open the gate to let our allied forces through. What went wrong?”

“I super don’t care!” Barney waved his hands towards the door empathetically. “Let’s just get the fuck out of here!”

“The plans for world domination will never work now,” Dr. Coomer continued, as if he couldn’t hear or understand Barney, as if he was speaking only to himself. “Without the alien armies, without Gordon’s strength allied with us, we’re powerless. This day will be nothing more than a footnote in history. Black Mesa has lost. The future of humanity is bright. How could everything have gone so wrong?”

“Oh, forget this guy.” Barney only signed this, turning away dismissively from Dr. Coomer. “Let’s get out of here. I hate this garbage pit.”

“Same. Still want to grab a beer?”

“Fuck yeah.” Barney sighed, gesturing for Gordon to follow him. “Jesus, I hate this place. I never want to think about any of this again.” He paused a second, almost hesitantly. “And we don’t have to mention the fact that you’re, uh, an emotionless killing machine ever again. If you don’t want to.”

“It doesn’t really bother me,” Gordon said honestly. “Maybe I can put it on my CV when I get another job?”

“At least in the extracurriculars, right?”

Barney stepped out of the locker room into the dark hallway where they came from, and Gordon spared a split second glance behind him at Dr. Coomer, bent over the picture frame of someone else’s child, lost in his own world. Where things didn’t always make more sense, but at least they were simple. 

He followed Barney. There really wasn’t anything else to do. 

But when he stepped into the dark hallway, he didn’t see Barney. He didn’t see anyone, actually, just gloom and stretching tile and concrete into the horizon. Had Barney lost track of him, or left him behind? No, he wouldn’t. The guy was loyal to a fault, and Gordon had the sense that Barney was scared to be alone in the cavernous depths of Black Mesa, where monsters skittered on the edges of perception. 

He walked down the hallway, convinced that he had just lost Barney in the darkness. Had it been this dark, a minute ago? The lights must have gone out. But as he walked forward, deeper and deeper into the hallway, he knew that it used to be shorter. He knew that the darkness, even with the lights out, was not this thick. It was oppressive, now, making it difficult for Gordon to even see his hands in front of his face. 

It worried him. Without his sight, he had no way to tell when aliens were approaching. Without Barney, he had no way of communicating with any possible allies. Even _if_ Barney was here, it was so dark that they wouldn’t be able to talk. He had to get out of this hallway. He had to get out of Black Mesa. For the first time, an urgency gripped Gordon’s heart, and he began to jog down the hallway.

He ran, and ran, and ran, until he saw faint pinpricks of light in the horizon. He kept running, and eventually the pinpricks of light multiplied and grew, moving until they were above him. Not just above - to the sides of him, on the walls and in the air and even on the ground. Gordon kept running straight into a field of twinkling stars, a distant Milky Way, his feet always hitting solid ground even as the path became translucent in the darkness.

Gordon ran for a minute, or maybe an eternity, before he saw another figure. Unlike everything else, it seemed to exist in space and time, and grew closer as Gordon ran closer. It was just a man, white with a bristly haircut in a cheap suit. His face held no particular expression, a complete monotone, as if he was carved in plastic. Although everything around them was dark, lit only by stars, Gordon could see him quite closely. 

“Mister Freeman,” the man in the suit said, signing as easily and fluently as Gordon himself. “I apologize for the confusion. It seems as if a certain mistake was made.”

Gordon slipped his Glock into his hand and shot the man. It went straight through him. That wasn’t usual. 

“Tell me, Mister Freeman. Can you see infinity in a human mind? The expanse of space in a grain of sand?” The man made no expression, gave no flourish to his words, rendering his speech in a strange and stiff monotone. “Do you understand the power of a mistake? A simple one. A butterfly flaps its wings in China, and you push your cart two centimeters to the left. A simple act of free will, and destiny itself is corrupted.”

There were too many questions for Gordon to ask, so he didn’t ask any. 

“It is alright, Mister Freeman. I am far stronger than a mistake. We’ll get it right the next time.” The man smiled thinly at Gordon, the first facial expression he had made the whole time. “And if not next time, then the next. Or the next...or the next…”

His hands trailed off, repeating the same motion over and over again, and every time the man made the motion the world faded just a little bit, as if it was a photograph reduced in the sun, or a rapidly decaying dream, living only a half-life before disappearing into nothing, and everything that Gordon understood of the world decayed into nothing. 

  
  


Wake up, Mister Freeman. Try again. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> My tumblr is theinternationalacestation.tumblr.com in case you want to ask me about my Half Life headcanons!


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